Monday, October 7, 2024

Dyslexia Debate - Martin Bloomfield with Julian Elliott (Part 2)

 


Julian Elliott:

What I mean by that is let's return to the original meaning of this term which is a severe and persistent problem with reading and we can use that to discuss or describe children.

So, the whole dyslexia debate is only about changing squiggles to language and that does not require high IQ.

My response:

True, changing squiggles to language does not require a high IQ. All the same, many children with high IQ are also not able to read in English. My last student before I stopped teaching had an IQ of 130. Here is his Psychological Assessment Report. LINK

 

I weaned him in less than 3 months and he is now reading at grade level in Form 2 (Grade 8).

His mother came to buy a copy of ‘Teach Your Child to Read’ for her daughter and to my pleasant surprise posted a message on Facebook. It is in Malay and I Google translated it into English. LINK

Has Julian researched why kids can change squiggles to languages in Malay and Pinyin that use the same squiggles as English?

Why can these kids change squiggles in both languages and yet not in English?

A friend suggested I should have recorded messages from parents of kids I taught. I started this in 2018 and you may read some of the testimonials. LINK


I should have recorded more testimonials from parents as suggested by Dr. Joe Torgesen in 2010.

In addition to having taught more than 80 ‘dyslexic’ kids, I have also taught several mothers in other countries to teach their ‘dyslexic’ kids.

To ‘diagnose’ the problem of ‘dyslexia’ (the original meaning of this term which is a severe and persistent problem with reading – Julian) all I ask for is a recording of the pronunciation of the consonants.

After listening to the recording, I tell the mothers I would get their kids to read within 4 months.

Here is a testimonial from a mother in Australia whom I chanced to meet on Twitter in December 2020. She has a master’s degree in Education and is an accomplished teacher. She was distraught that her son couldn’t read despite receiving a year of Specialised Systematic Synthetic Phonics from a tuition centre in Australia.  LINK


What was my basis for telling Alanna that I would be able to get her son to read in a few weeks? I asked Alanna for a recording of the sounds represented by the letters. That was enough for me to tell her the cause of her son being unable to read. Of course, I know this from having taught more than 80 similar kids.

One important thing is that I never talked to her son or taught him. I gave the links to my lessons to Alanna and she taught him.

In December/January 2020/2021 Dr. Sam Bommarito together with Timothy Shanahan were in the Twitter conversation with Alanna. When Alanna’s son became keen on reading, she asked the ‘experts’ in the Twitter discussion if anyone knew why her son was keen on reading just after 2 lessons and Dr. Sam replied that her son probably had met the right teacher. He gave the standard answer that no two children are the same. The other educators said nothing.

Here is another testimonial from a grandma in California. LINK


NOTE: In 2015 Timothy Shanahan told me that 50 students (at that time) was not enough of a population for evaluation. This is contrary to the Tamil proverb which says that to test if a pot of rice is cooked one grain of rice is enough.

Are educators /researchers that naïve or is there a puppeteer/s who is/are instructing them to make stupid statements?

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